Forget flowers, candy and jewelry. For Valentine’s Day, show your love for someone special by naming a cockroach after them.

Hate someone in particular, an ex perhaps? Name a cockroach after them as well.

The Children’s Museum in West Hartford has started a love- (and hate-) themed fundraising campaign. For $10, a donor can name one of the museum’s Madagascar hissing cockroaches, earthworms or crickets after someone they love. Those donors will get a certificate declaring their love-motivated donations by Feb. 13, and afterwards can visit the museum and coo over their namesakes.

For $20, donors can name a feeder cockroach after someone they despise. No certificates are offered for these donations, but donors will receive a link to a video of a lizard, raccoon or opossum devouring the roach named for their nemesis.

The museum’s senior development coordinator Joe DeFeo borrowed the idea for the “Love Bugs” fundraiser from the Bronx Zoo, which does it every year. DeFeo has a love-hate relationship with Valentine’s Day.

“I go on and off with it. I like it fine as an idea, but I don’t like spending the money on it,” DeFeo says.

The museum is a rescue-and-rehab facility housing about 150 animals, so the tax-deductible donations might appeal to those who love animals but prefer not to support zoos, DeFeo says.

“Once they are rehabbed, if they can be released, they are. If they can’t they are not,” he says.

But the Madagascar roaches, which were left behind when an exhibit was removed from the facility, can’t be released, he says. “They are an invasive species. If we release them, they would be hell on the local ecosystem.”

He called the supplies of nameable insects “unlimited.” “We can’t stop them if they are going to lay eggs. We don’t sterilize them.”